1 Title: Challenges to Yudkowsky's Pronoun Reform Proposal
4 Tags: Eliezer Yudkowsky
7 > Go, Soul, the body's guest,
8 > Upon a thankless errand:
9 > Fear not to touch the best;
10 > The truth shall be thy warrant:
11 > Go, since I needs must die,
12 > And give the world the lie.
14 > —["The Lie" by Walter Raleigh](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/trb9HPWFk8Gy9MBdN/less-wrong-poetry-corner-walter-raleigh-s-the-lie)
16 [In a February 2021 Facebook post, Eliezer Yudkowsky inveighs against English's system of singular third-person pronouns](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159421750419228). As a matter of clean language design, English's lack of a gender-neutral singular third-person pronoun is a serious flaw. The function of pronouns is to have a brief way to refer back to entities already mentioned: it's more concise to be able to say "Katherine put her book on its shelf" rather than "Katherine put Katherine's book on the book's shelf". But then why couple that grammatical function to sex-category membership? You shouldn't _need_ to take a stance on someone's sex in order to talk about her or him putting a book on the shelf.
18 This affects, for example, science-fiction authors writing about AIs or hermaphroditic aliens (which don't have a sex), or mystery authors writing about a crime suspect whose identity (and therefore, sex) is unknown. In these cases, [_she_ or](/2020/Apr/the-reverse-murray-rule/) _he_ are inappropriate, but the English language offers no alternative lacking its own downsides: _it_ is understood to refer to non-persons, _they_ gets conjugated as a plural, and neopronouns like [_ey/em/eir_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spivak_pronoun)—or [_ve/ver/vis_](http://www.urticator.net/essay/0/30.html), as used in some of [Yudkowsky's juvenilia](https://intelligence.org/files/CFAI.pdf)—are hard to rally adoption for because pronouns are a [closed class](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Part_of_speech#Open_and_closed_classes)—not something people are used to new members of being coined, in the way that people are used to seeing unfamiliar nouns and adjectives.
20 It doesn't have to be this way! If you were fortunate enough to be in the position of intelligently designing a language from scratch, you could just include a singular third-person gender-neutral pronoun (like _it_, but for persons, or like _they_ but unambiguously singular) in the original closed set of pronouns! If you wanted more pronoun-classes to reduce the probability of collisions (where universal [_ey_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spivak_pronoun) or singular _they_ would result in more frequent need to repeat names where a pronoun would be ambiguous), you could devise some other system that doesn't bake sex into the language while driving the collision rate even lower than that of the sex-based system—like using initials to form pronouns (<em>K</em>atherine put <em>k</em>er book on its shelf?), or an oral or written analogue of [spatial referencing in American Sign Language](https://www.handspeak.com/learn/index.php?id=27) (where a signer associates a name or description with a direction in space, and points in that direction for subsequent references).
22 (Although—one might speculate that "more classes to reduce collisions" could _be_ part of the historical explanation for grammatical gender, in conjunction with the fact that sex is binary and easy to observe. None of the other most salient features of a human can quite accomplish the same job: age is continuous rather than categorical; race is also largely continuous [(clinal)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cline_(biology)) and historically didn't typically vary within a tribal/community context.)
24 If you grew up speaking English, gendered pronouns feel "normal" while gendered [noun classes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noun_class) in many other languages (where, _e.g._, in French, a dog, _le chien_, is "masculine", but potatoes, _la pommes de terre_, are "feminine") seem strange and unnecessary, but someone who grew up with neither would regard both as strange. If you spoke a language that didn't _already_ have gendered pronouns, you probably wouldn't be spontaneously eager to add them.
26 All this seems fine as a critique of the existing English pronoun system! However, I argue that Yudkowsky's prescriptions for English speakers going forward goes badly wrong. First, Yudkowsky argues that it's bad for stances on complicated empirical issues to be baked into the language grammar itself: since people might disagree on who fits into the [empirical clusters](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WBw8dDkAWohFjWQSk/the-cluster-structure-of-thingspace) of "female" and "male", you don't want people to be forced to make a call on that just in order to be able to use a pronoun.
28 Fair enough. Sounds like an argument for universal singular _they_ (and eating the cost of increased collisions where it's ambiguous which subject an instance of _they_ would refer to): if you don't think pronouns should convey sex-category information, then don't use pronouns that convey sex-category information! But then, in an unexplained leap, Yudkowsky proclaims:
30 > So it seems to me that the simplest and best protocol is, "'He' refers to the set of people who have asked us to use 'he', with a default for those-who-haven't-asked that goes by gamete size" and to say that this just _is_ the normative definition. Because it is _logically_ rude, not just socially rude, to try to bake any other more complicated and controversial definition _into the very language protocol we are using to communicate_.
32 The problem with this is that [the alleged rationale for the proposal does not support the proposal](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/i6fKszWY6gLZSX2Ey/fake-optimization-criteria). If your default pronoun for those-who-haven't-asked goes by perceived sex (which one presumes is what Yudkowsky means by "gamete size"—we almost never _observe_ people's gametes), then you're still baking sex-category information into the language protocol in the form of the default! Moreover, this is clearly an "intended" rather than an accidental effect of the proposal, in the sense that a policy that _actually_ avoided baking sex-category information into the language (like universal singular _they_, or name-initial- or hair-color-based pronouns) would not have the same appeal to many of those who support self-chosen pronouns: _why_ is it that some people would want to opt-out of the sex-based default?
34 Well, it would seem that the motivating example—the causal–historical explanation for why we're having this conversation about pronoun reform in the first place—is that trans men (female-to-male transsexuals) prefer to be called _he_, and trans women (male-to-female transsexuals) prefer to be called _she_. (Transsexuals seem much more common than people who just have principled opinions about pronoun reform without any accompanying desire to change what sex other people perceive them as.)
36 But the _reason_ trans people want this is _because_ they're trying to change their socially-perceived sex category and actually-existing English speakers interpret _she_ and _he_ as conveying sex-category information. People who request _he/him_ pronouns aren't doing it because they want their subject pronoun to be a two-letter word rather than a three-letter word, or because they hate the [voiceless postalveolar fricative](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_postalveolar_fricative) (_sh_) sound. They're doing it _because_, in English, those are the pronouns for _males_. If it were _actually true_ that _she_ and _he_ were just two alternative third-person pronouns that could be used interchangeably with no difference in meaning, with the only function of the distinction being collision-avoidance, then _there would be no reason to care_ which one someone used, as long as the referent was clear. But this doesn't match people's behavior: using gender pronouns other than those preferred by the subject is typically responded to as a social attack (as would be predicted by the theory that _she_ and _he_ convey sex-category information and transsexuals don't want to be perceived as their natal sex), not with, "Oh, it took me an extra second to parse your sentence because you unexpectedly used a pronoun different from the one the subject prefers as per convention, but now I understand what you meant" (as would be predicted by the theory that "_he_ refers to the set of people who have asked us to use _he_ [...] and to say that this just _is_ the normative definition").
38 You can't have it both ways. "That toy is worthless", says one child to another, "_therefore_, you should give it to me." But if the toy were _actually_ worthless, why is the first child demanding it? The problem here is not particularly subtle or hard to understand! If the second child were to appeal to an adult's authority, and the adult replied, "The toy _is_ worthless, so give it to him," you would suspect the grown-up of not being impartial.
40 "Pronouns shouldn't convey sex-category information, as a politically neutral matter of language design," is a fine [motte](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/03/all-in-all-another-brick-in-the-motte/), but it's not consistent with the bailey of, "_Therefore_, when people request that you alter your pronoun usage in order to change the sex-category information being conveyed, you should obey the request." Even if the situation is an artifact of bad language design, as Yudkowsky argues—that in a saner world, this conflict would have never come up—that doesn't automatically favor resolving the conflict in favor of the policy of keeping both _she_ and _he_ but asserting that the difference doesn't mean anything.
42 This may be clearer to some readers if we consider a distinction less emotionally and politically fraught than sex/gender in the current year. [Many languages have two different second person singular pronouns that distinguish the speaker's relationship to the listener as being more familiar/intimate, or more formal/hierarchical.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T%E2%80%93V_distinction) In Spanish, for example, [the familiar pronoun is _tú_ and the formal pronoun is _usted_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_personal_pronouns#T%C3%BA/vos_and_usted): one would address friends, family members, children, or personal servants as _tú_, but strangers or social superiors as _usted_. Using the wrong pronoun can be the cause of offense or awkwardness. A speaker switching from _usted_ to _tú_ for an interlocutor who they're getting along with might ask if it's okay with _¿Te puedo tutear?_ (Can I call you _tú_?) or _Nos tuteamos, ¿verdad?_ (We call each other _tú_, right?); this is somewhat analogous to an English speaker asking if they may address someone by first name, rather than with a courtesy title or honorific (Ms./Mr. Lastname, or ma'am/sir).
44 One could argue that the _tú_/_usted_ distinction is bad language design for the same reason Yudkowsky opposes the _she_/_he_ distinction: you shouldn't be forced to make a call on how familiar your relationship with someone is just in order to be able to use a pronoun for them. The modern English way is more flexible: you _can_ indicate formality if you want to by saying additional words, but it's not baked into the grammar itself.
46 However, if you were going to reform Spanish (or some other language with the second-person formality distinction), you would probably abolish the distinction altogether, and just settle on one second-person singular pronoun. Indeed, that's what happened in English historically—the formal _you_ took over as the universal second-person pronoun, and the informal singular _thou_/_thee_/_thine_ has vanished from common usage. (People still recognize it as a second-person pronoun when encountered in old poetry—"The truth shall be thy warrant", _&c._—but most probably aren't aware of the formality distinction.) You wouldn't keep both forms, but circularly redefine them as referring only to the referent's preferred choice of address (?!).
48 Similarly, when second-wave feminists objected to the convention of _Miss_ or _Mrs._ forcing speakers to identify a woman's marital status, the response was [to popularize the marriage-agnostic alternative _Ms._](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ms.#Historical_development_and_revival_of_the_term), not to circularly redefine _Miss_ and _Mrs._
50 Or consider how previous generations of public intellectuals considered this exact problem. In 1983, Douglas R. Hofstadter also expressed disapproval of _she_ and _he_ as a matter of language design, and to illustrate the point about how alien and unnecessary gendered language would seem if you weren't already used to them, wrote a satirical piece, ["A Person Paper on Purity in Language"](https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/purity.html), in the persona of a conservative author in a society with race-based (!) language conventions, including the pronouns whe/wis for whites and ble/bler for blacks. In neither the piece itself (during which Hofstadter's alter-ego brings up and rejects a couple of reform suggestions from the liberals of whis Society, including singular _they_), nor the Post-Scriptum in its subsequent [anthologization](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metamagical_Themas), does Hofstadter entertain the idea of redefining _he_ and _she_ (or _whe_ and _ble_) to refer to the subject's pronoun preference. It's worth asking: why not? If it's so clear to Yudkowsky in 2021 that self-identification is the "simplest and best protocol" to repair the objective flaw in English's design, why didn't that simplest and best solution occur to Hofstadter in 1983?
52 Really, the circular definition shouldn't satisfy _anyone_: people who want someone to call them _usted_ (or _tú_), do so _because_ of the difference in meaning and implied familiarity/respect, in the _existing_ (pre-reform) language. (Where else could such a preference possibly come from?) From an AI design standpoint, the circular redefinition can be seen as a form of ["wireheading"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/aMXhaj6zZBgbTrfqA/a-definition-of-wireheading). You want people to respect you as a superior, and if they respected you as a superior, they'd call you _usted_. That could make a policy of coercing people into calling you _usted_ seem superficially appealing. But the appeal solely rests on confusing the pre-reform meaning (under which the choice of _usted_ implies respect and is therefore desirable) and the post-reform meaning (under which the choice implies nothing). Whether or not the proponent of the change consciously _notices_ the problem, the redefinition is _functionally_ "hypocritical": it's only desirable insofar as people aren't _actually_ using it internally.
54 This is a pretty basic point, and yet Yudkowsky steadfastly ignores the role of existing meanings in this debate, bizarrely writing as if we were defining a conlang from scratch:
56 > It is Shenanigans to try to bake your stance on how clustered things are and how appropriate it is to discretely cluster them using various criteria, _into the pronoun system of a language and interpretation convention that you insist everybody use!_
58 There are a couple of problems with this. First of all, the "that you insist everybody use" part is kind of a [DARVO](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARVO) in the current political environment around Yudkowsky's social sphere. A lot of the opposition to self-chosen pronouns is about opposition to _compelled speech_: people who don't think some trans person's transition should "count"—however cruel or capricious that might be—don't want to be coerced into legitimizing it with the pronoun choices in their _own_ speech. That's different from insisting that _others_ use sex-based non-subject-preferred pronouns, which is not something I see much of outside of gender-critical ("TERF") forums. Characterizing the issue as being about "freedom of pronouns", [as Yudkowsky does in the comment section](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159421750419228?comment_id=10159421833274228), elides the fact that freedom to specify how _other people_ talk about you is in direct conflict with the freedom of speech of speakers! No matter which side of the conflict one supports, it seems wrong to characterize the self-ID pronoun side as being "pro-freedom", as if there wasn't any "freedom" concerns on the other side. [(Policy debates should not appear one-sided!)](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PeSzc9JTBxhaYRp9b/policy-debates-should-not-appear-one-sided)
60 More importantly, however, in discussing how to reform English, we're not actually in the position of defining a language from scratch. Even if you think the [cultural evolution](/2020/Jan/book-review-the-origins-of-unfairness/) of English involved Shenanigans, it's not fair to attribute the Shenanigans to native speakers accurately describing their native language. Certainly, language can evolve; words can change meaning over time; if you can get the people in some community to start using language differently, then you have _ipso facto_ changed their language. But when we consider language as an information-processing system that we can reason about using our standard tools of probability and game theory, we see that in order to change the meaning associated with a word, you actually _do_ have to somehow get people to change their usage. You can _advocate_ for your new meaning and use it in your own speech, but you can't just _declare_ your preferred new meaning and claim that it applies to the language as actually spoken, without speakers actually changing their behavior. As a result, Yudkowsky's proposal "to say that this just _is_ the normative definition" doesn't work.
62 To be clear, when I say that the proposal doesn't work, I'm not even saying I disagree with it. I mean that it literally, _factually_ doesn't work! Let me explain.
64 The "meaning" of language isn't some [epiphenominal](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fdEWWr8St59bXLbQr/zombies-zombies) extraphysical fact that can be declared or ascertained separately from common usage. We can only say that the English word "dog" means [these-and-such four-legged furry creatures](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog), _because_ English speakers actually use the word that way. [The meaning "lives" in the systematic correspondence between things in the world and what communication signals are sent.](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4hLcbXaqudM9wSeor/philosophy-in-the-darkest-timeline-basics-of-the-evolution)
66 There's nothing magical about the particular word/symbol/phoneme-sequence "dog", of course. In German, they say _Hund_; in Finnish, they say _koira_; in Korean, they say _개_. Germans and Finns and Koreans (and their dogs) seem to be getting along just as well as we Anglophones.
68 Nevertheless, it is a fact _about contemporary English_ that "dog" means dog. If you thought this was bad for whatever reason, and you wanted to change that fact, you'd have to change the behavior of actually-existing English speakers. If you tried to stipulate on your Facebook wall that the word "dog" should mean _tree_ now, and all of your Facebook friends nodded in agreement at your clever argument _and then continued to call dogs "dogs" and trees "trees" in their everyday life just like they always had_, then your language reform attempt would have, _in fact_, failed—even if the fact that it failed would be less obvious if you only looked at the Facebook thread full of people nodding in agreement.
70 The inseparability of meaning from behavior-and-usage may be clearer if considered in a context other than that of natural language. Take computer programs. Sometimes programmers make bad design decisions. For example, in the C programming language, [it's standard to represent strings (textual data) in memory with a sequence of bytes ending in a zero (null) character](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null-terminated_string); the machine only knows where the string stops when it reaches the null at the end. This convention has a lot of disadvantages relative to the alternative of [prefixing the string data with the length](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/String_(computer_science)#Length-prefixed); a missing or misplaced null character could cause the machine to erroneously read or write data in adjacent memory, causing serious bugs or security vulnerabilities.
72 Given the existence of strong arguments for the length-prefixed string convention, replacing old software that uses null-terminated strings with new software that uses length-prefixed strings, sounds like a good idea! But the thing is, you _do_ have to upgrade or replace the old software. If you _just_ start sending data in a new format to the old software that doesn't understand the new format, your code is not going to yield the expected results. It would be _convenient_ if you could just declare a new semantics for your existing data on your Facebook wall and be done, but that just doesn't work if you're still using the old software, which is programmed to behave according to the old data-interpretation convention. This continues to be true even if the convention you're trying to retire is very bad (like null-terminated strings), and if the old software is widely deployed and would be very expensive to systematically replace. The backwards-compatibility trap [is real and can't be defied away even if it's very unpleasant.](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1216799697907486720)
74 Natural language faces a similar backwards-compatibility trap. The English language, as "software", is _already_ "deployed" [to 370 million brains as native speakers, and another 980 million second-language speakers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_number_of_speakers#Top_languages_by_population). And among those hundreds of millions of speakers, there is _already_ a very firmly entrenched convention that _she_ refers to females and _he_ refers to males, such that if you say, "I met a stranger in the park; she was nice", the listener is going to assume the the stranger was (or appeared to be) female, even if you didn't say "The stranger was female" as a separate sentence. If the listener later gets the chance to meet the stranger and the stranger turns out to be (or appear to be) male, the listener is going to be _surprised_: your pronoun choice induced them to [mis-anticipate their experiences](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/a7n8GdKiAZRX86T5A/making-beliefs-pay-rent-in-anticipated-experiences).
76 Bad language design? I mean, maybe! You could argue that! You could probably get a lot of Likes on Facebook arguing that! But if 370 million native English speakers _including you and virtually everyone who Liked your post_ are going to _continue_ automatically noticing what sex people are (or appear to be) and using the corresponding pronouns without consciously thinking about it (in accordance with the "default for those-who-haven't-asked" clause of your reform proposal), then the criticism seems kind of idle!
78 The "default for those-who-haven't-asked [going] by gamete size" part of Yudkowsky's proposal is _trying_ to deal with the backwards-compatibility problem by being backwards-compatible—prescribing the same behavior in the vast majority of cases—but in doing so, it fails to accomplish its stated purpose of de-gendering the language.
80 To _actually_ de-gender English while keeping _she_ and _he_ (as contrasted to coordinating a jump to universal singular _they_, or _ve_), you'd need to _actually_ shatter the correlation between pronouns and sex/gender, such that a person's pronouns _were_ just an arbitrary extra piece of data that you couldn't deduce from their appearance and just needed to remember in the same way you have to remember people's names and can't deduce them from their appearances. But as far as I can tell, _no one_ wants this. When's the last time you heard someone request pronouns for _non_-gender-related reasons? ("My pronouns are she/her—but note, that's _just_ because I prefer the aesthetics of how the pronouns sound; I'm _not_ in any way claiming that you should believe that I'm in any sense female, which isn't true.") Me neither.
82 But given that pronouns _do_ convey sex-category information, as a _fact_ about how the brains of actually-existing English speakers _in fact_ process language (whether or not this means that English is terribly designed), some actually-existing English speakers might have reason to object when pressured to use pronouns in a way that contradicts their perception of what sex people are.
84 In an article titled ["Pronouns are Rohypnol"](https://fairplayforwomen.com/pronouns/), Barra Kerr compares preferred pronouns to the famous [Stroop effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stroop_effect). When color words are printed in text of a different color (_e.g._, <span style="color:blue;">red</span>, <span style="color:green">orange</span>, <span style="color:red">yellow</span>, <span style="color:purple">green</span>, <span style="color:orange">blue</span>, _&c._) and people are asked to name the color of the text, they're slow to respond: the meaning of the word interferes with their ability to name the color in front of our eyes.
86 Kerr suggests that preferred pronouns have a similar effect, that "a conflict between what we see and know to be true, and what we are expected to say, affects us." As an exercise, she suggests (privately!) translating sentences about transgender people to use natal-sex-based pronouns.
88 Unfortunately, I don't have a study with objective measurements on hand (let me know in the comments if you do!), but I think most native English speakers who try this exercise and introspect—especially using examples where the trans person exhibits features or behavior typical of their natal sex, with things like "she ejaculated" or "he gave birth" being the starkest examples—will agree with Kerr's assessment: "You can know perfectly the actual sex of a male person, and yet you will still react differently if someone calls them _she_ instead of _he_."
90 Let's relate this is Yudkowsky's specialty of artificial intelligence. In a post on ["Multimodal Neurons in Artificial Neural Networks"](https://openai.com/blog/multimodal-neurons/), Gabriel Goh _et al._ explore the capabilities and biases of the [CLIP](https://openai.com/blog/clip/) neural network trained on textual and image data.
92 There are some striking parallels between CLIP's behavior, and phenomena observed in neuroscience. Neurons in the human brain have been observed to respond to the same concept represented in different modalities (_e.g._, [Quiroga _et al._](/papers/quiroga_et_al-invariant_visual_representation_by_single_neurons.pdf) observed a neuron in one patient that responded to photos and sketches of actress Halle Berry, as well as the text string "Halle Berry"), and so do CLIP neurons. Futhermore, CLIP is vulnerable to a Stroop-like effect where its image-classification capabilities can be fooled by "typographic attacks"—a dog with instances of the text "$$$" superimposed over it gets classified as a piggy bank, an apple with a handwritten sign saying "LIBRARY" gets classified as a library. The network knows perfectly what dogs and apples look like, and yet still reacts differently if adjacent text calls them something else.
94 I conjecture that the appeal of subject-chosen pronouns lies _precisely_ in how they exert Stroop-like effects on speakers' and listeners' cognition. (Once again, if it were _actually true_ that _she_ and _he_ had no difference in meaning, _there would be no reason to care_.) [Pronoun badges](/2018/Oct/sticker-prices/) are, quite literally, a typographic attack against native English speakers' brains.
96 Note, I mean this as a value-free description of how the convention _actually functions_ in the real world, [not a condemnation](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/N9oKuQKuf7yvCCtfq/can-crimes-be-discussed-literally). One could consistently hold that these "attacks" are morally good. (Analagously, [supernormal stimuli](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Jq73GozjsuhdwMLEG/superstimuli-and-the-collapse-of-western-civilization) like chocolate or pornography are "attacks" against the brain's evolved nutrition and reproductive-opportunity detectors, but most people are fine with this, because our goals are not evolution's.)
98 Is susceptibility to Stroop-like effects an indication of bad mind design? I mean, probably! One would expect that an intelligently-designed agent (as contrasted to messy human brains coughed up [blind evolution](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jAToJHtg39AMTAuJo/evolutions-are-stupid-but-work-anyway) or [lucky](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dpzLqQQSs7XRacEfK/understanding-the-lottery-ticket-hypothesis) neural networks found by gradient descent) could easily bind and re-bind symbols on the fly, such that a sane AI from the future could use whatever pronouns without dredging up any inapplicable mental associations, and tell you the color of the text "<span style="color:blue;">red</span>" just as easily as "<span style="color:red;">red</span>". But it seems kind of idle to criticize humans for not having a capability that we can't even give our best AIs.
100 Back to Kerr's article—importantly, Kerr is _explicitly_ appealing to psychological effects of different pronoun conventions. She is absolutely _not_ claiming that the use of preferred pronouns is itself a "lie" about some testable proposition. She writes:
102 > I've heard many people tell me they don't mind doing this, as a courtesy, although it takes some effort to keep up the mental gymnastics of perceiving one sex, but consistently using pronouns for the other. That's a personal choice, and I respect the reasons why some people make it.
104 > I've also heard many people declaring that anyone who won't comply (usually directed at a woman) is obnoxious, mean, hostile, and unpleasant. 'Misgendering' is hate speech. They say.
106 > But I refuse to use female pronouns for anyone male.
108 Note the wording: "That's a personal choice", "_I_ refuse". Kerr knows perfectly well that people who use gender-identity-based pronouns aren't making a false claim that trans men produce sperm, _&c._! Rather, she's saying that a pronoun convention that groups together females, and a minority of males who wish they were female, affects our cognition about that minority of males in a way that's disadvantageous to Kerr's interests (because she wants to be especially alert to threats posed by males), such that Kerr refuses to comply with that convention in her own speech. (Compare to how a Spanish speaker might refuse to address someone they disrespected as _usted_ because of its connotations, without thereby claiming that using _usted_ would make the sentence literally false.)
110 I take pains to emphasize this because Yudkowsky [misrepresents what his political opponents are typically claiming](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/12/weak-men-are-superweapons/), repeatedly trying to frame the matter of dispute as to whether pronouns can be "lies" (to which Yudkowsky says, No, that would be ontologically confused)—whereas if you _actually read_ what the people on the other side of the policy debate are saying, they're largely _not claiming_ that "pronouns are lies"! (It seems fair to regard Kerr's article as representative of gender-critical ("TERF") concerns; I've seen the post linked in those circles more than once, and it's cited in [embattled former University of Sussex professor Kathleen Stock](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kathleen_Stock#Views_on_gender_self-identification)'s book _Material Girls_.)
112 (Relatedly, [critics of this blog](/2020/Nov/the-feeling-is-mutual/) sometimes refer to me as _she_, reflecting their belief that I'm a trans woman in denial, even though I think of myself of a man ([adult human male](/2018/Apr/reply-to-the-unit-of-caring-on-adult-human-females/) not trying to appear otherwise). I never correct them—not just because [it's kind of flattering](/2021/May/interlude-xxi/), and not just because I don't think of myself as having the right to dictate how other people talk about me—but because "she" _is_ the correct pronoun to convey the meaning _they're_ trying to express, whether or not _I_ agree with it. "Lying" isn't the issue on anyone's mind.)
114 Anyway, given these reasons why the _existing_ meanings of _she_ and _he_ are relevant to the question of pronoun reform, what is Yudkowsky's response?
116 Apparently, to play dumb. In the comments of the Facebook post, Yudkowsky claims:
118 > I do not know what it feels like from the inside to feel like a pronoun is attached to something in your head much more firmly than "doesn't look like an Oliver" is attached to something in your head.
122 I'm sorry, but I can't take this self-report literally. I certainly [don't think Yudkowsky was _consciously_ lying](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bSmgPNS6MTJsunTzS/maybe-lying-doesn-t-exist) when he wrote that. (When speaking or writing quickly without taking the time to scrupulously check, [it's common for little untruths and distortions to slip into one's speech](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pZSpbxPrftSndTdSf/honesty-beyond-internal-truth). Everyone does it, and if you think you don't, then you're lying.)
124 Nevertheless, I am _incredibly_ skeptical that Yudkowsky _actually_ doesn't know what it feels like from the inside to feel like a pronoun is attached to sex categories more firmly than a given name is attached to someone's appearance.
126 I realize this must seem impossibly rude, presumptuous, and uncharitable of me. Yudkowsky _said_ he doesn't know what it feels like from the inside! That's a report out his own mental state, which he has privileged introspective access to, and I don't! What grounds could I possibly, _possibly_ have to think he's not telling the truth about his own mind?
128 It's a good question. And my answer is, even without mind-reading technology, people's minds are still part of the same cause-and-effect physical universe that I can (must) make probabilistic inferences about, and verbal self-reports aren't my _only_ source of evidence about someone's mind. In particular, if someone's verbal self-report mis-predicts what we know about their _behavior_, it's far from clear that we should trust the report more than our senses.
130 And the thing is, Eliezer Yudkowsky is a native English speaker born in 1979. As a native English speaker born in 1987, I have a _pretty good_ mental model of how native English speakers born in the late 20th century use language. And one of the things native English speakers born in the late 20th century are _very good_ at doing, is noticing what sex people are and using the corresponding pronouns without consciously thinking about it, because the pronouns are attached to the concept of sex in their heads more firmly than proper names are attached to something in their heads.
132 I would bet at very generous odds at some point in his four decades on Earth, Eliezer Yudkowsky has used _she_ or _he_ on the basis of perceived sex to refer to someone whose name he didn't know. Because _all native English speakers do this_. Moreover, we can say something about the [cognitive algorithm](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HcCpvYLoSFP4iAqSz/rationality-appreciating-cognitive-algorithms) underlying _how_ they do this: [people can recognize sex from facial photos _alone_ (hair covered, males clean-shaven) at 96% accuracy](/papers/bruce_et_al-sex_discrimination_how_do_we_tell.pdf). In naturalistic settings where we can see and hear more [secondary sex characteristics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secondary_sex_characteristic#In_humans) than just someone's face (voice, build, height, breasts, [gait](https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/2010/09/24/all-the-wrong-moves/), _&c_.), accuracy would be even greater. It's not a mystery why people can get sex-based pronouns "right" the vast majority of the time without having to be told or remember specific people's pronouns.
134 Conversely, I would also bet at very generous odds that in his four decades on Earth, Eliezer Yudkowsky has very rarely if ever assumed what someone's name is on the basis of their appearance without being told. Because _no native English speakers do this_ (seriously, rather than as a joke or a troll). If you doubt this, try to explain what algorithm you would use to infer that someone's name is "Oliver" based on how they look. What are the "secondary Oliver characteristics", specifically? People for whom it was _actually true_ that names map to appearances the way pronouns map to sex, should not have trouble answering this question!
136 If there _were_ a substantial contingent of native English speakers who don't interpret pronouns as conveying sex category information, one would expect this to show up in our cultural corpus more often! In contrast, it's very easy to find instances of speakers treating pronouns and sex as synonymous. As an arbitrarily chosen example, in [one episode](https://theamazingworldofgumball.fandom.com/wiki/The_Nest) of the animated series [_The Amazing World of Gumball_](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/WesternAnimation/TheAmazingWorldOfGumball) featuring the ravenous spawn of our protagonists' evil pet turtle, the anthropomorphic-rabbit [Bumbling Dad](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BumblingDad) character [says, "Who's to say this pregnant turtle is a _her_?" and everyone gives him a look](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5N2Msnrq7wU&t=14s).
138 The joke, you see, is that bunny-father is unthinkingly applying the stock question "Who's to say _X_ is a he/she?" (which makes sense when _X_ is, _e.g._, "the nurse") in a context where there's an obvious answer—namely, that the referents of "her" pronouns are female and only females get pregnant—but the character is too stupid to notice this, and we enjoy a laugh at his expense.
140 _The Amazing World of Gumball_ is rated [TV-Y7](https://rating-system.fandom.com/wiki/TV-Y7) and the episode in question came out in 2016. This is not a particularly foreign or distant cultural context, nor one that is expected to tax the cognitive abilities of a seven-year-old child! Is ... is Yudkowsky claiming not to get the joke?
142 Posed that way, one would imagine not—but if Yudkowsky _does_ get the joke, then I don't think he can simultaneously _honestly_ claim to "not know what it feels like from the inside to feel like a pronoun is attached to something in your head much more firmly than 'doesn't look like an Oliver' is attached to something in your head." In order to get the joke in real time, your brain has to _instantly_ make a multi-step logical inference that depends on the idea that pronouns imply sex. (The turtle is a "her" iff female, not-female implies not-pregnant, so if the turtle is pregnant, it must be a "her".) This would seem, pretty straightforwardly, to be a sense in which "a pronoun is attached to something in your head much more firmly than 'doesn't look like an Oliver' is attached to something in your head." I'm really not sure how else I'm supposed to interpret those words!
144 Perhaps it's not justified to question Yudkowsky's "I do not know what it feels like [...]" self-report based on generalizations about English speakers in general? Maybe his mind works differently, but dint of unusual neurodiversity or training in LambdaMOO? But if so, one would expect some evidence of this in his publicly observable writing. In Yudkowsky's 2001 _Creating Friendly AI: The Analysis and Design of Benevolent Goal Architectures_, the text "If a human really hates someone, she" is followed by [footnote 16](https://web.archive.org/web/20070615130139/http://singinst.org/upload/CFAI.html#foot-15): "I flip a coin to determine whether a given human is male or female." Note, "_is_ male or female", not "which pronoun to use." The text would seem to reflect the common understanding that _she_ and _he_ do imply sex specifically (and not some other thing, like being named Oliver), even if flipping a coin (and drawing attention to having done so) reflects annoyance that English requires a choice.
148 > My current policy stance is that anybody who does feel that way needs to get some perspective about how it can be less firmly attached in other people's heads; and how their feelings don't get to control everybody's language protocol or accuse non-protocol users of lying; especially when different people with firm attachments have _different_ firm attachments and we can't make them all be protocol.
150 The sheer _chutzpah_ here is jaw-dropping. Someone's feelings don't get to control everybody's language protocol, huh? But—the causal–historical reason we're discussing pronoun reform _at all_ is _precisely_ to let trans people's feelings control everybody's language protocol! The original post is very explicit about this! It says:
152 > Even _before_ considering all gender issues, there is some sense in which somebody saying "help help pronouns attacking" sounds to me like a sympathetic innocent asking to get out from under a bad system, not like a law-deuniversalizer asking for exceptions from a good system.
154 > In terms of important things? Those would be all the things I've read—from friends, from strangers on the Internet, above all from human beings who are people—describing reasons someone does not like to be tossed into a Male Bucket or Female Bucket, as it would be assigned by their birth certificate, or perhaps at all.
156 Okay, so Yudkowsky never thought sex-based pronouns were a good idea in the first place. But the _important thing_, he says, is that some people ("who are people", Yudkowsky pleonastically clarifies, as if anyone had doubted this) don't want other people to use language that refers to what sex they are.
158 Personally, I have a _lot_ of sympathy for this, because in an earlier stage of my ideological evolution, I _was_ one of those people. (I [tried to use an ostensibly gender-neutral nickname and byline for a while in the late 'aughts](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#literary-initials), and while I never asked for new pronouns, this is probably a matter of Overton window placement rather than any underlying difference in sentiments; it seems pretty obvious that my analogue growing up in the current year's ideological environment would be a trans woman.)
160 But it's important to not use sympathy as an excuse to blur together different rationales, or obfuscate our analysis of the costs and benefits of different policies. "Systematically de-gender English because that's a superior language design" and "Don't misgender because trans people are sympathetic" are _different_ political projects with different victory conditions.
162 Perhaps it might make sense for adherents of a "degender English" movement to stategically _ally_ with the trans rights movement: to latch on to gender-dysphoric people's pain as a political weapon to destabilize what the English-degenderers think of as a bad pronoun system for _other reasons_. Fine.
164 But if that's the play you want to make, you forfeit the right to _honestly_ claim that your stance is that "feelings don't get to control everybody's language protocol". If you proclaim that the "important thing" is trans people's feelings of "not lik[ing] to be tossed into a Male Bucket or Female Bucket, as it would be assigned by their birth certificate", that would seem, pretty straightforwardly, to be an attempt to let someone's feelings control everybody's language protocol! I'm really not sure how else I'm supposed to interpret those words!
166 There's nothing _inconsistent_ about believing that trans people's feelings matter, and that the feelings of people who resent the Stroop-like effect of having to speak in a way that contradicts their own sex-category perceptions, don't matter. (Or don't matter _as much_, quantitatively, under the utilitarian calculus.) But if that were your position, the intellectually honest thing to do would be to tell people like Barra Kerr, "Sorry, my political coalition believes that trans people's feelings are more important than yours with respect to this policy question," rather than haughtily implying that people like Kerr are making an elementary philosophy mistake that they are _clearly not making_ if you _actually read what they write_.
168 [TODO: self-identity is a Schelling point]
170 [TODO: "Can't imagine a sympathetic protagonist"—lies, imagine a rape victim]
172 [TODO: I need the correct answer]
175 * "If there were unspeakable arguments against, we couldn't talk about them"—okay, then you and your rationalists are frauds
176 * I know none of this matters (If any professional alignment researchers wasting time reading this instead of figuring out how to save the world, get back to work!!), but one would have thought that the _general_ skills of correct argument would matter for saving the world.
177 a rationality community that can't think about this stuff, but can get existential risk stuff right, is like asking for self-driving car software that can drive red cars but not blue cars
184 * work in the LambdaMOO anecdote where appropriate
185 * singular they for named individuals undermined indefinite singular 'they'
186 • not the woke position—it's an incoherent position
188 appeal to inner privacy conversation-halter https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wqmmv6NraYv4Xoeyj/conversation-halters
190 don't use "baked in" so many times
192 https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159421750419228
194 https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/onwgTH6n8wxRSo2BJ/unnatural-categories-are-optimized-for-deception
196 > misgendering sucks, but what feels even more violent is when people get my pronouns right and i can tell they still perceive me as a man
197 https://twitter.com/AFROlNCOGNlTO/status/1389080592084463618
199 > a lot of cis people use 'learning someone's pronoun' as a copout from doing the important internal work of actually reconsidering their impression of the person's gender
200 https://twitter.com/pangmeli/status/1079097805250224130
201 > like let's be real—the reason you have a hard time "remembering" her pronoun is because you don't really think of her as a her. if you practiced thinking of her as a her, her pronoun would just come. and then you wouldn't be privately betraying her in your head all the time.
202 https://twitter.com/pangmeli/status/1079142303183327232
204 • Aside: "gamete size"—this is a tic where everyone knows what sex is, but no one is allowed to acknowledge the cluster
205 • Aella https://knowingless.com/2019/06/06/side-effects-of-preferred-pronouns/
206 • I need the correct answer
207 • "We can't talk about this"—utterly discrediting of the entire project"
208 • What is the regularity in human psychology such that we end up with "gendered" noun classes? We are sexually dimorphic animals
209 • the people aligning language models need to know this!!
210 • he can only speak in terms of abstractions that are very obviously not what's happening—it's true that bathroom usage is not an ontological fact, but the function of bathrooms is _to protect females from males_. If you can't talk about that core issue—the thing that people actually care about—then the smugness is actively derailing the discussion, even if you didn't say anything false
211 • And doesn't EY have this whole thing about how you can't just wish away coordination problems?! (Although, this also makes it harder to escape the self-ID Schelling point)
212 • Schild's ladder—noun classes in other languages are already pretty arbitrary; if the proposal is to make names like that
213 • TODO: buff my "circular definition satisfies no one" argument to not be vulnerable to the anti-Liskov-substitution property of natural language definitions
215 https://www.ehu.eus/seg/_media/gizt/5/5/brown-gilman-pronouns.pdf
217 What Quakers Can Teach Us About the Politics of Pronouns
218 https://archive.is/bYdde
220 https://www.genderdissent.com/the-resistance-column
222 https://www.womenarehuman.com/extra-jail-time-for-incarcerated-women-who-use-male-pronouns-for-male-transgender-identifying-inmates/
224 Spanish speakers screw up he/she—because they're used to dropping pronouns! https://cogsci.mindmodeling.org/2017/papers/0639/paper0639.pdf
226 https://twitter.com/RichardDawkins/status/1468204472908369926
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blob